I discovered McCreary’s tutorial a few weeks ago, while searching for a faster way to prototype a website rather than go through my usual laborious process of:

Updating HTML and CSS files on my local machine

Uploading them via FTP

Refreshing the browser over and over

This is not a very efficient process indeed! Of course, this is usually a good way to work when making updates to a site post launch, but is too time-consuming during development in which many changes are happening in a short time frame.

My developer friend had mentioned how easy it is to set up a virtual host a few months ago, so I became curious..and finally decided to try it after discovering McCreary’s tutorial.

After reading his tutorial, and looking at a few other resources online, I was able to successfully set up three locally-hosted websites for quick HTML prototyping!

If you are interested in doing quick HTML prototyping, but don’t fancy yourself a programmer or an adventurer in the lands of the Mac OS X terminal, it may be worth your while to give McCreary’s tutorial a try 🙂 Of course, if the terminal is just too dangerous a frontier (there are risks involved), you can check out other local host software (for free and purchase) such as MAMP and MAMP Pro. However, these options probably won’t give you the satisfaction of figuring out how to saddle down and set up your own virtual host in the wild frontier of your own personal computer!

Below are links to resources that can help you set up your virtual host for Mac OS X Yosemite on your own local machine, so you can more effectively prototype your next web project 🙂